AFRL

The Air Force Research Laboratory was formed on October 31, 1997, by combining four separate Air Force laboratories and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research into a single organization. Headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, it leads science and technology research for both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, with about 5,400 civilian and military staff.

AFRL’s space work is led by its Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which has flown a long line of experimental satellites testing new technologies in Earth orbit. With Oracle, the directorate is going farther out than ever before: two spacecraft designed to develop ways to find and track objects in cislunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon, as it becomes busier with NASA, commercial and international missions.